Note: references to the Iliad use the book and line numbers of the
assigned translation (R. Lattimore/U. of Chicago Press) and correspond
to the original Greek text; references to the Aeneid use the book and
line numbers of the assigned translation (A. Mandelbaum/Bantam Books).

WHAT IS THE AENEID?

The Aeneid is an epic poem in twelve books or
chapters, written by the Roman poet, Virgil (70-19 B.C.), between 30
B.C. and 19 B.C. It tells the story of the Trojan warrior,
Aeneas, in the aftermath of the Trojan War. During the sack of
Troy, Aeneas fled
the city with his father, Anchises, and his son, Ascanius. Led by
the prophecies that promised him a future kingdom, he and his followers
finally settled in Latium, a region of central Italy. From his
descendants
were said to come the Roman people.

THE LEGEND OF AENEAS

The legend of Aeneas’ escape, his journey to
Italy, and his role as the ancestor of the Roman people grew out of an
episode in Homer’s Iliad that takes place during Achilleus’ rampage on
the battlefield. With Apollo’s encouragement, Aeneas (=Aineias,
in the Greek spelling) challenges Achilleus. As they fight,
Poseidon, the god of the sea, sees that
Aeneas is in danger of being slain by Achilleus. He says:
“But why does this man, who is guiltless, suffer his sorrows
for no reason, for the sake of others’ unhappiness, and always
he gives gifts that please them to the gods who hold the wide heaven.
But come, let us ourselves get him away from death, for fear
the son of Kronos may be angered if now Achilleus
kills this man. It is destined that he shall be the survivor,
that the generation of Dardanos shall not die, without seed
obliterated, since Dardanos was dearest to Kronides
of all his sons that have been born to him from mortal women.
For Kronos’ son has cursed the generation of Priam,
and now the might of Aineias shall be lord over the Trojans,
and his sons’ sons, and those who are born of their seed hereafter.
(20.297-308)”
This short passage - easily overlooked in the dramatic account of
Achilleus’ rage - lies at the heart of the legend of Aeneas. It
establishes
that Aeneas was destined to survive the sack of Troy, and it explains
that
he and his descendants would rule over the descendants of the
Trojans. In the classical and Hellenistic periods, various
legends developed that described Aeneas’ wanderings and the cities he
allegedly visited or founded. By the end of the fifth century
B.C., the Greek writer, Hellanicus, is known to have written that
Aeneas eventually reached Italy. As the Romans came into contact
- and conflict - with the Greeks in the third and second centuries
B.C., they sought to link themselves with Greek legends, and gradually
adopted Aeneas - an enemy of the Greeks - as an ancestor and a founder
of a city, Lavinium, that was a precursor of Rome itself.
In the Aeneid, Virgil elaborated upon these
legends, reworked some of them, and organized them into a grand epic
that stressed Aeneas’ role as the ancestor of the Roman people and
linked his personal destiny with the historical destiny of Rome to
become the seat of a great empire. At its core, though, is the
hero whom Homer destined for survival in the Iliad. Even the
brief sketch of Aeneas in the Iliad (20.297-99) as a “guiltless” man
who suffers sorrows for no reason, despite his devotion to the gods,
became the starting point for Virgil’s portrayal of his hero. In
the prologue to the Aeneid, Virgil echoed that description by asking
why Juno “compelled a man remarkable for goodness to endure so many
crises, meet so many trials” (1.15-17).

THE STORY IN THE AENEID

The first half of the Aeneid charts Aeneas’
wanderings, and may be compared with Homer’s account of Odysseus’
wanderings
in the Odyssey. It begins in the middle of the story - in the
typical
fashion of ancient epic - with Aeneas’ arrival in Carthage where he
meets
Queen Dido, herself a refugee from the Phoenician city of Tyre.
In
Carthage, Aeneas tells his own story. This gives the audience a
"flashback",
for Aeneas describes the sack of Troy (book two) and his subsequent
wanderings
(book three). Virgil’s tale continues with the tragic love affair
between
Aeneas and Dido (book four) and the queen’s suicide after Aeneas
abandoned
her to pursue his destiny. After Aeneas commemorates the first
anniversary
of his father’s death with funeral games in Sicily (book five), the
first
half ends with his landing in Italy and visit to the underworld (book
six).
There, he meets figures from his own past, and the shade of his father,
Anchises, shows him a pageant of great Romans, as a prophecy of the
destiny of their descendants.
The second half of the poem describes the wars
he fought in Italy. It is a complex account rich in allusions to
the Trojan War and Homer’s Iliad. As in the Iliad, a contested
marriage lies at the heart of the struggle. The aged king of the
Latins, Latinus, welcomes Aeneas and proposes that his daughter,
Lavinia, marry Aeneas to
unite the two peoples and fulfill a prophecy (book seven). The
goddess,
Juno - Aeneas’ antagonist throughout the poem, inflames Latinus’ wife,
queen
Amata, with rage against the Trojans, and war soon breaks out.
The
queen had supported a marriage between Lavinia and the Rutulian
warrior,
Turnus. Turnus leads the forces against the Trojans, and, at the
end
of the poem, he is slain by Aeneas.

THREE APPROACHES TO THE AENEID

In our discussion of the Aeneid, I will focus
on three ways of examining the poem. Poetically, Virgil offers a
sophisticated reworking of Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, to
create an epic for the Roman people that would rival the poems of
Homer. Ethically, Virgil explores the making of a Roman hero, as
Aeneas struggles to become a figure characterized by the Roman virtue,
pietas, and embodying the ideals of Stoic ethics. Politically,
Virgil reflects upon Roman history. By linking Greek mythology
with Roman history, he looks ahead to the growth of Rome’s empire and
the century of violence and civil strife that preceded the triumph of
Octavian (Augustus) over Marc Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 B.C.

VIRGIL'S POETRY: HIS CREATIVE USE OF HOMER

In the most obvious way, Virgil connects his
poem with the Homeric epic by telling a story that grows out of the
legends of the Trojan War. He also fills his tale with the
familiar meddling gods and goddesses - under their Latin names - of the
Homeric epic. Virgil, however, does much more than simply build
on the legends in Homer’s poem. He carefully transforms specific
scenes from Homer, purposefully develops complex parallels between his
characters and those in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and creatively
adapts poetic devices, like the simile and embedded narrative, from
Homer’s epics. At first, this might challenge our ideas of
artistic creativity or originality, but Virgil is most creative
precisely in the imaginative and surprising ways in which he uses
familiar material from Homer, and the Odyssey's own complex
relationship to the Iliad provides one starting point for Virgil's
approach. References to Homer’s poems suggest contrasts and
comparisons that deepen the meaning and intensify the impact of
Virgil’s work. What at first seems like imitation soon reveals itself
to be a complex dialogue
between Virgil and Homer, in which the Roman poet seeks to outdo his
own
mentor.
For us, Virgil’s use of Homer is one example
of a larger issue: the response of Rome to the culture of the Greeks
whom
they conquered. As such, it represents an important thread
linking
different parts of the course together. We’ll discuss how early
Christian writers, like Augustine, and medieval artists responded to
the classical tradition of Greece and Rome, and we’ll see how the
medieval Italian poet, Dante, literally made use of Virgil as a
character in his Divine Comedy, as he created a Christian epic in the
vernacular language, Italian. It may suggest some reflection on
how we still today make use of this past.

AENEAS: A ROMAN OR STOIC HERO IN THE MAKING

Virgil uses the figure of Aeneas to reflect
upon the Roman hero. While many scenes invite us to compare
Aeneas
with Homeric heroes like Achilleus, Hektor or Odysseus, there are
important
differences. From the opening lines of the poem, Aeneas is
characterized
as a good man who suffers. As he develops, he is portrayed as a
man
who must learn to dominate his passions, suppress his own desires, and
subordinate
his own individual will to a larger divine plan. In short, he
must
be willing to make and accept sacrifices to fulfill a destiny for the
good of his descendants. He must learn to embrace a “sense of
duty”, the Roman virtue, pietas; he must fulfill his duty to those to
whom duty is owed: the gods, his father and son, his descendants and,
by extension, the future people of Rome. Whether Aeneas achieves
this is a question that is left
open in the poem, and Virgil may be exploring the difficulty - or
impossibility - of fully becoming the sort of character who can tame
the passions and subordinate the will for a higher purpose.
Some of the characteristics that Aeneas
displays - or aspires to - are consistent with Stoic philosophy.
Stoicism
was a philosophy that gained popularity in the Hellenistic
period.
The Greek philosopher, Zeno of Citium, was its founder (c. 300 B.C.),
and
it derived its name from the Stoa Poikile - the painted porch, the
place
in Athens where he and his followers taught. The philosophy
became
popular with Romans who focused upon its ethical aspects, and tried to
adapt
its ethical precepts to the active lives and practical concerns of
statesmen and soldiers. Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor of the
late second century A.D., wrote a philosophical diary, the Meditations,
that reflects his Stoic philosophy and expresses some of its key
tenets.
The Stoics held that the universe was
rationally governed and it was the Stoic’s responsibility to harmonize
one’s own desires with what was good for the whole - whether that
refers to the order of
things in nature or the social order. The image of the Body
Politic
expresses this view well. Marcus Aurelius described it this way:
“We were born to labor together, like the feet, the hands, the eyes,
and the rows of upper and lower teeth. To work against one
another is therefore contrary to nature, and to be angry against a man
or turn one’s back on
him is to work against him.”
(Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, book II.1, translated by G.M.A.
Grube, Hackett: Indianapolis, 1983, p. 11)
For the Stoic, virtue is the only good, and one must learn to endure
misfortunes, secure in the knowledge that these are only apparent
evils. This provides another answer to the issue raised in so
many works in the course - and posed by Virgil at the opening of the
Aeneid: why do good individuals suffer misfortunes? Marcus
Aurelius writes:
“Neither through ignorance nor with knowledge could the nature of the
Whole have neglected to guard against this or correct it; nor through
lack
of power or skill could it have committed so great a wrong, namely that
good and evil should come to the good and the evil alike, and at
random. True, death and life, good and ill repute, toil and
pleasure, wealth and poverty, being neither good nor bad, come to the
good and the bad equally. They are therefore neither blessings
nor evils.” (Meditations, II.11)
What on earth does that mean!? In effect, he is saying that, in
a rationally governed universe, it cannot be true that good and wicked
individuals equally suffer good and ill fortune - as Achilleus had
suggested in his
story of the urns of the Zeus. He accepts that those things which
people regard as misfortune - a bad reputation, labor, poverty, even
death
- do come to the good and bad alike, but he concludes that, because of
this,
they cannot be truly bad and must simply be endured. In other
instances,
he argues that we must remember that everything that happens, happens
for
the good of the Whole, and we, as part of the Whole, benefit from that:
“There is also Necessity and what is beneficial to the whole ordered
universe of which you are a part. That which is brought by the
nature of the Whole, and preserves it, is good for every part.”
(Meditations II.3)

THE AENEID: REFLECTIONS ON ROMAN HISTORY

In the Aeneid, Aeneas’ destiny and that of
Rome are presented as a divine plan unfolding through history.
This historical or political dimension of Virgil’s poem is one that
also sets it apart
from Homer’s work. Virgil mentions nearly contemporary events
like
the battle of Actium depicted on the Shield of Aeneas (8.874-929) or
the
death and funeral of Augustus’ nephew and son-in-law, Marcellus
(6.1148-82).
By contrast, Homer never referred to specific events in his own time,
and,
today, students of Homer and the oral tradition still puzzle over
linguistic
and archaeological evidence in an effort to piece together the
historical
roots of the world he describes. Later Greeks would try to link
the
Homeric stories with subsequent historical events. The historian,
Herodotus,
saw the Trojan War as part of a chain of causes that eventually led to
the
Persian Wars of the early fifth century B.C. Herodotus’
histories,
Greek tragedies and the public monuments of fifth century Athens show
that
the Greeks viewed the Persian Wars as a clash of two contrasting
cultures,
and projected that view backwards onto the Trojan War. In fact,
when
Alexander the Great launched his war of conquest against the Persian
Empire
in 334 B.C., he is said to have visited the site of Troy. Where
Homer
had described two peoples - the Greeks and Trojans - who worshipped the
same
gods and spoke the same language, later Greeks came to see the Trojans
as
antecedents of the Persians, and Priam as a distinctly Asian monarch.
Such efforts to link myth and history provided
precedents for Virgil’s own work. Aeneas’ destiny merges with the
future destiny of Rome, and Virgil incorporates prophecies, visions and
representations of Rome’s history - conceived of as the future of
Aeneas’
descendants - into the Aeneid. The conflicts between the Greeks
and
Trojans and the tragic love affair of Aeneas and the queen of Carthage,
Dido, become the roots of Rome’s later wars with Carthage and Roman
expansion
into the Greek world. This allows Virgil to use the poem to
reflect
upon two great facts of Roman history: the establishment of a
world-empire
through military power, and the collapse of the institutions of the
Roman
Republic in a century of bloody chaos and civil strife. Virgil
examines
the cost and consequences of Rome’s achievements, and he raises
questions
about the future of a people whose past has been characterized by such
violence.